I always learn so much from Pat Polowsky. This graduate student is half my age and twice as knowledgeable about cheese, especially if we’re talking chemistry. In that case, it’s more like a factor of ten. Ever wondered how salt gets to the middle of a wheel when it’s only applied to the outside? (You didn’t?) Did you think the crunch on the rind of Taleggio comes from salt? I did, but it doesn’t.

(l to r): Raschera, Taleggio, St. George, Campo de Montalban, Chevre in Blue

Yikes. Does your credit-card balance look like mine? I know January sends many of us into fits of austerity, but cutting back doesn’t have to mean cutting out. Keep eating cheese! I prowled my local cheese counters for tasty options under $20 a pound and had no trouble assembling a list of worthy contenders. These ten selections deliver amazing value and most of them are in shops year-round.

One sign of a true cheese enthusiast is a refrigerator full of little wrapped nubbins, pieces too big to throw away but too pitiful-looking to serve to a guest. Recently, my husband and I had an entire cheese course of nubbins—probably 10 different two-ounce remnants making their last stand. The one I kept coming back to was Cabra Raiano, a semisoft Portuguese goat’s milk cheese. I nibbled at some of the others, but this one I polished off. Even as a days-old leftover, it was sublime.

Are you up for a quiet island vacation in a natural setting with few other tourists around? After hearing Manual Maia describe Terceira, one of the nine islands in the remote Azores, I put it on my bucket list. “There are more cows than people,” says Maia, whose company, TradiFoods, imports Portuguese specialties.

Anybody who sells cheese for a living knows there’s a large contingent of goat cheese avoiders. These folks lump all styles of goat cheese together and banish them all in one emphatic “yuk.” Presumably they’re remembering some overly tangy, chalky fresh chèvre they once sampled that smelled like a goat barn. We’ve all had one of those.